Hackaday Links: Sunday, August 4th, 2013

[Craig Turner] shows that simplicity can be surprisingly interesting. He connected up different colors of blinking LEDs in a grid. There’s no controller, but the startup voltage differences between colors make for some neat patterns with zero effort.

It takes four really big propellers to get an ostrich off the ground. This quadcopter’s a bit too feathery for us, but we still couldn’t stop laughing.

This Kinect sign language translator looks pretty amazing. It puts the Kinect on a motorized gimbal so that it can better follow the signer. We just had a bit of trouble with translation since the sound and text are both in Hebrew. This probably should have been a standalone feature otherwise.

I don’t get the blinky LEDs “hack.” It’s just some blinking LEDs. Why is this impressive? The video describes a pattern. But I don’t see a pattern. Just a bunch of flashing LEDs that will sometimes line up, as flashing LEDs will do based on their variation in construction.

That’s it exactly, the construction of the LEDs makes the pattern (different colors require different forward voltages and currents to work). It’s not random. Watch two LEDs or two colors for a while. But even that doesn’t matter – the brain will create patterns even for random sequences anyway. The pattern may drift after a while. But, I agree it’s not an impressive hack, just cheap and cheerful, pretty science.

Inre: IC wheelbarrow
The video doesn’t show it actually carrying a load. And it appears to only have engine braking and gravity to slow it down. This criticism is from someone who actually had to use a loaded wheelbarrow lately.